Great Moors of al-Andalus
as recounted by Wijjie
A note about Wijjie
Wijjie is a young lady from Damascus. She is fluent in Classical Arabic, English, Swedish and Spanish. She is doing research on the heritage of the Damascene Caliphs of the Ummeyad Dynasty, in Moorish Spain. She is also an expert on the works of the 20th century Syrian poet Nizar Kabani. In the photo, we see her by the Guadalquivir River in Seville, with the Giralda in the background. You can write to her at wijjie@donlorenzo.com
Wijjie's page "Great Moors of al-Andalus" thus far features the love story of the poet Ibn Zaydun and the Princess Wallada, and the life of the great philosopher of Cordoba, Averroes
Ibn Zaydun and the Princess Wallada
A few months ago I was sitting at a sidwalk café, in the shadow of the medieval walls of Cordoba – and just a few steps from a curious statue of two hands which seem to be reaching towards one another. I knew, from my studies in Damascus, that it pays tribute to a great Moorish poet and the Princess, also a poetess, whom he loved.
It was Saint Valentine’s day, a bright winter morning. I pretended not to know what the statue represented and, just to see what he would say, asked the young waiter if he did, as if I were any other tourist.
“That statue is dedicated to los enamorados, the lovers”. he said, as he served my cup of coffee.
The love story of the poet Ibn Zaydun and his beautiful, courageous Princess is still alive in the hearts of the people of Cordoba, the capital of Moorish Spain and of the Ummeyad Caliphs. But where I was born, Syria, their poems are studied in every high school student’s Arabic literature class.
But who really was the passionate and daring Ummeyad princess?
When Cordoba was the greatest and most sophisticated city, not only of the Moorish but also the entire known world, the Princess Wallada (1011- 1091) achieved fame for her court of learning, many centuries before France’s legendary Madame de Rambouillet held sway over her literary salon. Wallada gathered around her the finest poets and musicians of al-Andalus, who would sit around her on cushions and rugs, improvising ballads and epic sagas to the sound of the lute and zither.
Wallada, who was the daughter of the Caliph al-Mustakfi, was greatly admired for her fair skin and blue eyes, which gave her a very special, exotic appeal for the men of Cordoba. In fact, she was so proud of her beauty that she refused to wear the veil when she went out in the streets of the city, thus enraging the local mullahs. It was the time of the great fitna, when the Berbers were rising up against the Ummeyad Caliphate, and religious tension was high.
But Cordoba was in many ways much more liberal in its customs than some Middle Eastern countries are today. This was because the Andalucian society of the time was a multi-cultural one, a mixture of the Islamic, Christian and Jewish civilisations which made up medieval Spain. This meant that no single religion had full power over the men, and particularly over the women, of the city.
Wallada not only refused to cover her face, she also was very outspoken and free in her sexual behaviour, thus becoming a symbol of liberation for the women of her time. She resisted all efforts to keep her in her traditional place, and to prevent her from choosing the lovers she preferred.
When the great Moorish philosopher and supreme judge of the city, Ibn Rushd, known to Europeans as Averroes, accused her of being a harlot, she responded with an act of defiance. She had one of her own poems embroidered on her gown and wore it in the street, for everyone to read. It said:
For the sake of Allah! I deserve nothing less than glory
I hold my head high and go my way
I will give my cheek to my lover
and my kisses to anyone I choose.
She had many lovers, but the most famous was the Ibn Zaydun, one of the greatest Moorish poets of the time, born in 1003 and died in 1071.
Although Ibn Zaydun was a leading figure in the courts of Cordoba and Seville, he was most famous among the people of his day because of his scandalous love affair with Princess Wallada. They did nothing to hide their passion, and at her literary circle, when the poets began improvising, as was their custom, they would allude to it quite openly. On one famous occasion, Wallada uttered this impromptu verse, as she gazed upon her lover’s face:
I fear for you, my beloved
so much, that even my own sight
even the ground you tread
even the hours that pass
threaten to snatch you away from me.
Even if I were able to conceal you within the pupils of my eyes
and hide you there until the Day of Judgment
my fear would still not be allayed.
And he, returning her glance just as ardently, responded:
Your passion has made me famous among high and low
your face devours my feelings and thoughts.
When you are absent, I cannot be consoled,
but when you appear, all my cares and troubles fly away.
Ibn Zaydun’s prestige, as the leading poet and the lover of the most beautiful woman of Cordoba, awakened much jealousy among his rivals, such as Ibn Abdus, the Caliph’s Vizir. He created a venemous intrigue aimed at destroying his enemy’s friendship with the Caliph and also his romance with Wallada.
At first he failed, but then succeeded in catching Ibn Zaydun making love to Wallada’s favourite slave, an African girl. The proud Princess was so hurt that she wrote him a poem of rebuke:
If you had been truly sincere in the love which joined us
you would not have preferred, to me, one of my own slaves.
In so doing, you scorned the bough which blossoms with beauty
and chose a branch which bears only hard and bitter fruit.
You know that I am the clear, shining moon of the heavens
but, to my sorrow, you chose, instead, a dark and shadowy planet.
Ibn Abdus then made his rival jealous by letting it be known that Wallada had taken him as her lover, and by walking beside her in the streets of Cordoba. The arrow hit its mark, and the wounded Ibn Zaydun bitterly wrote these lines to the woman he thought had spurned him:
You were for me nothing but a sweetmeat that I took a bite of
and then tossed away the crust, leaving it to be gnawed on by a rat.
This caused much amusement in the city, because Ibn Zaydun had compared the unpopular Vizir to a rat. The ugly old man went straight to the Caliph to complain, but rather than mention the insult to his own person, he pointed out that the poet had compared a Princess of the realm to a pastry crust.
Soon after, Ibn Zaydun fell out of favour altogether. Wallada discovered him fornicating with a man. Homosexuality is forbidden in the Koran, but was widely practiced by the Moors of the time nevertheless. She used the occasion to send him back an even more hurtful poem than the one he had addressed to her:
The nickname they give you is Number Six
and it will stick to you until you die
because you are a pansy, a bugger and a fornicator
a cuckold, a swine and a thief.
If a phallus could become a palmtree,
you would turn into a woodpecker.
Although the Caliph was fond of Ibn Zaydun, the scandal reached such proportions that he had him thrown into prison, and later exiled to Seville. The hapless poet languished there, far from the gardens of the great palace, Medina Zahara, and he passionately missed his beloved Princess. Fortunately for him, the Caliph died soon afterwards and Ibn Zaydun was able to return. The lovers forgave one another and for a while their affair continued, just as passionate and stormy as before. But Wallada now lived in the home of powerful Vizir, who gave her protection, and Ibn Zaydun, disenchanted, eventually decided to return to Seville, where he spent the rest of his life as the favourite poet of the Sultan.
Averroes, the philosopher of Cordoba
I have always been especially fond of the great Moorish philosopher Averroes. He was born in Cordoba, then the capital of al-Andalus, in 1126. His real Arabic name was Ibn Rushd Al-Cortobi, or “of Cordoba”, and we can admire his statue today, just outside the medieval walls. He is wearing a turban and elegant beard and beautiful pointed slippers, and he seems to be getting up from his seat to welcome a visitor, perhaps to tell him the tale of the sadly forgotten love affair between the Arab peoples and the noble art of philosophy.
He has been known to Westerners as Averroes since the Middle Ages (ave = ibn, rroes = rushd), and although I am an Arab I prefer to call him by his Latin name because his work has always been better understood by Europeans than by his countrymen. He was truly a universal man, and is most famous for having helped Europeans to discover the lost philosophy of the Ancient Greeks, which led to the classical revival known as the Renaissance.
Averroes came from a wealthy and important Cordovan family. Like his father, he was a judge, or cadí, and eventually rose to the position of supreme magistrate of the city. Averroes also became a close friend of the Caliph al-Mansur. His high standing with the Caliph gave him many privileges, but it created much envy and later brought about his ruin.
Averroes was bitterly attacked for his ideas and writings, which the Muslim clerics saw as a threat to their orthodox vision of the universe. But Averroes was not only rejected by the Islamic fanatics. The Christian Church condemned him for spreading heretical beliefs, as a result of which his supporters were persecuted and his books were burned in public. He was also a great admirer of the Persian philosopher Avicenna (in Arabic, Ibn Sina) who, as a “sceptic”, was widely read by European thinkers and reviled by the Mullahs.
The Caliph of al-Andalus, like many other emirs and sultans of the Arab world, held a court of learning in his palace where scientists, mathematicians, translators, poets, philosophers and astrologers could meet and discuss their ideas and discoveries. It was al-Mansur who brought the works of Aristotle and Plato from Damascus and Baghdad and encouraged Averroes to translate them. He added his own interpretations of the Greek’s ideas and called the work “Comments on the works of Aristotle”, which eventually earned him the epithet of “The Great Commentator”. This book became a real Bible for European philosophers, until the works of Aristotle could be translated directly from Greek into Latin.
The works of Averroes and Avicenna were attacked by an Islamic sophist theologian, Al-Ghazali, in his book “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”, in which he accused philosophers of being dishonest, heretical and presumptuous. Averroes set out to defend himself against the very serious accusation of heresy, in a book which he sarcastically entitled “The Incoherence of the Incoherence”.
In his retort, Averroes claimed that philosophy is the most sophisticated form of religion. He argued that philosophy goes hand in hand with faith. It does not deny divine revelation at all, he said, but, rather, confirms it.
According to Averroes, metaphysical truth reveals itself in two forms, philosophy which is only for the elite, and religion which is for the uneducated masses. However, he said, the origin of life could not be known to man, and no mortal can either confirm or deny the existence of God.
Averroes did not reject religion but, rather, saw it as the best way of life for the people. However, he did reject all theories of creation and insisted that the world has no beginning and no end, but that behind it all is God. He also believed that the human soul is part of the undivided universal self.
“The Incoherence of the Incoherence” incensed the Mullahs of Cordoba, who felt that Averroes’ book was “dangerous”, and they used it to blackmail his protector the Caliph, accusing him of dabbling in heresy. In spite of his enormous power and his admiration for Averroes, the leader was forced to expel the philosopher from Spain. Averroes sought asylum in Marrakesh, and stayed there until his death in 1198. He was so disappointed in his friend the Caliph that when permission was given for him to return to Cordoba, towards the end of his life, he turned it down.
In the Arab world, Averroes is still paying for his outspoken behaviour. Although his name is upheld as a glory of Arab intellectual culture, his teachings – shockingly - are not available to the general public. Last summer when I visited my grandparents’ home in Damascus, I went to several bookshops to look for a copy in Arabic of “The Incoherency of the Incoherency”, only to be told that his books are banned in Syria.
I went away amazed. How could Averroes, the philosopher of Cordoba, still be a threat to modern society, after eight long centuries?
GRANADA, CITY OF MY DREAMS, a book for the curious traveller, written and illustrated by Lorenzo Bohme and published by Editorial Natívola (2003) is now in its 3rd edition. To read about it and Nativola's other publications, click here.
